Plastic: Remaking Our World

The exhibition Plastic: Remaking Our World, presently on display at Lisbon's futuristic Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), looks at a revolutionary and deeply controversial material that we refer to by the generic term “plastic” but which, in fact, includes a universe of synthetic products, with different characteristics and uses. 

Plastic is everywhere, it’s the fabric of everyday life. Used and experienced differently across the globe as product and waste, it is essential yet superfluous, life-saving and life-threatening, seductive but dangerous.  Never has there been more urgency to understand the evolution of this man-made material over the past 150-years and to unpack the wondrous, yet cautionary tale of its invention and use. Plastic: Remaking Our World charts the material’s unparalleled rise, enormous popularity, and the dawning realisation of its destructive power. Probing design’s role within this story, it asks how plastic has both enabled extraordinary innovations and new ways of living, and at the same time contributed to the inescapable environmental pollution crisis we are experiencing today.

Divided into three sections, the exhibition opens with a film installation exploring the relationship between plastic and nature at a fundamental, geological level. The second section traces the history of plastic from its natural origins to the scientific experiments that were carried out with synthetic materials in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It continues with the rise of the petrochemical industry and its impact on the scale of production in manufacturing as well as the concern for the planet that grew towards the end of the twentieth century. Finally, the third section takes stock of contemporary efforts to rethink plastic and to implement alternatives, to reduce production and consumption and encourage reuse of plastic.

With this look to the future, Plastic: Remaking Our World is a call to action at this time of climate emergency.

Exhibition produced in partnership with MAAT, Vitra Design Museum, and V&A Dundee. Lisbon, 22/03--28/08/2023

maat

BITTE LACHEN / PLEASE CRY

Barbara Kruger

Bitte Lachen / Please Cry

29.04.2022 to 28.08.2022 
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

The Neue Nationalgalerie presents Barbara Kruger's first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin. The American conceptual artist has developed a site-specific text installation for the Neue Nationalgalerie’s upper-level exhibition hall, making use of the entire space. The work seeks to engage visitors in public discussion about political and social topics.

In an expansive text installation, Barbara Kruger combines her own texts with quotes by three authors ‒ George Orwell, James Baldwin and Walter Benjamin ‒ whose writings each address major political issues: the violence of totalitarian states, the mechanisms behind societal discrimination and the dangers of biased historiography.

Through the stark graphic impact of her texts, reduced to just three colours (black, white and red), Kruger succeeds in introducing her own artistic language into Mies van der Rohe’s massive building. Aside from the topicality of the texts and their subject matter, the invitation extended to Barbara Kruger to develop this work also pays homage to her outstanding artistic contributions, whose feminist and political approaches have strongly influenced the art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

State and Totalitarianism

At the centre is a sentence borrowed from Orwell’s book 1984: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face ‒ forever."

This nightmarish vision of a totalitarian state originated from Orwell, directly following the Second World War. The statement was intended as a reckoning and reflection on the National Socialist dictatorship in Germany. In his novel 1984, Orwell issued a universal and timeless warning to society to question and criticise any form of state violence and control. By citing this well-known quote, Barbara Kruger also recalls the universal dangers that can arise at any time from repressive structures and nations. Given the current war in Europe, this warning about violence brought about by a totalitarian state seems all the more prescient.

Consumerism and Affirmation

The literary quotes are accompanied by short texts written by the artist that have been adopted from social media news. They address visitors directly and refer to the discrepancies between self-perception and self-alienation, for instance, “Please cry” or “Is that all there is?”. In contrast to Mies van der Rohe’s classical and austere architecture, Kruger employs her own distinctive aesthetic while fundamentally questioning the consumer-oriented, uncritical ways of life that characterise many of today’s societies.

The Artist Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) has been known since the 1970s for her large-scale graphic works featuring sharply worded statements or short texts, which she uses to examine and interrogate common social stereotypes from a feminist and consumerism-critical perspective. She addresses how images and ideas are circulated and perceived today.

130 Years of National Geographic_exhibition

Protecting the environments become the most important crossroad of our time. Our existence depends on the conservation of the planet. Therefore, the research projects whose purpose is to guarantee this survival are key to our very own future as a species.

130 years ago, there was an identical desire to learn about our environment in order to improve it. This brought together 33 scholars including natural scientists, geographers, cartographers, educators, lawyers, and fom the military, to create an entity which would contribute to extending the boundaries of knowledge of geography. Thus was born the National Geographic Society, founded on a cold day, 27 January 1888 in Washington D.C. by this heterogeneous group of wise men, among which were philanthropist Gardiner Greene Hubbard, the first President of the Society, and his son-in-law, British inventor, scientist, and speech therapist Alexander Graham Bell, who succeeded him as President. 
Since then, National Geographic has become the most important non-profit institution in the world, and an absolute reference when it comes to exploration and research.

Under the protection of the yellow frame of its iconic logo, in the last century and a half the National Geographic Society has supported the careers of scientists and researchers from all around the world. Figures such as the North Pole explorer Robert E. Peary, or the man who discovered the city of Machu Pichu, Hiram Bingham, as well as those who are closer to our contemporary period. This is the case of the primatologists Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey; the oceanographer and marine archaeologist who discovered the remains of the Titanic, Robert Ballard; film-maker James Cameron; Spanish marine biologist, Enric Sala; and the recent winner of the 2018 Princess of Asturias Award, also a marine biologist, Sylvia Earle.

"A Window to the World. 130 Years of National Geographic" shows not only the history of the Society and its legacy, but also the evolution of an institution that has been capable of adapting to the times, and to vary the definitions of its main missions according to the demands of the said missions. Although when it started out the goal of the 33 founders was to explore the geography of the world and search for places that were still unknown to man, the challenges have varied according to the times to accommodate other priorities. Geography has given way to exploration of other worlds: space, with articles and documentaries about NASA missions and unknown universes such as Mars, and the oceans, the latest current frontier, source of life from the beginning of our planet, and one of the main conservation missions in order to guarantee the survival of our species. In the words of Sylvia Earle, "No Blue, No Green," in reference to how much we depend on the sustainability of the seabed in order to recover the environmental balance. 

Through photographs, videos, and iconic objects, the exhibition delves into these issues, presented in five sections, through which we will learn more about the early days, but especially about the present and future of National Geographic, its missions and their meaning. Visitors will begin their journey in Terra incognita, where we celebrate the birth of the Society and the age of expeditions. In Origin, visitors will learn about the explorations that have contributed to discovering our development as a species. In De Profundis, we propose a look at this essential underwater world, with the presence of the Pristine Project, the mission set up by Enric Sala in 2008 to explore the last wild underwater enclaves. In The Future at Stake we look towards space, but also to the challenges that we have as a species to reverse the degradation of our natural environment, and finally, the Coexistence section shows us other challenges that National Geographic also currently addresses, such as gender and racial diversity in our global society, the most relevant issues of the present.

The exhibition A Window to the World. 130 Years of National Geographic is on at the Espacio Telefónica in Madrid (Fuencarral, 3) until February 24th, 2019.